Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

What instruction the baby brings to the mother!

The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.